Obama’s Town Hall Spikes Facebook

On April 20th, President Obama visited Facebook headquarters to hold an online “town hall” meeting focused on the economy and The White House’s proposals for deficit reduction. Questions for the President were submitted in advance via The White House’s Facebook page, through The White House’s website, live from a number of social networks and from Facebook employees in the room.

On the day of the event (April 20th), traffic to WhiteHouse.gov increased 70% when compared to the same day one month prior (March 23rd); moreover, the site’s share of traffic from Facebook increased 712%.

Facebook has consistently been one of the top five traffic drivers to WhiteHouse.gov, but on the day of the town hall meeting, Facebook became the greatest traffic driver for WhiteHouse.gov and represented 28% of all visits going to the website. In addition, 76% of the visits coming from Facebook were new (meaning they had not visited the website in the past 30 days), whereas 67% of the visits coming from Facebook a month ago were new – this indicates that the partnership between Facebook and The White House drove a significant share of new visitors to The White House’s website.